Forum:2018-02-09 (Friday)
Discussion for comic for . Genius is an infinite capacity for making edits. ---- Ooh! Ooh! Are we going to meet the Queen soon? ➤ That poor young lady in the first panel looks as if she thinks Wooster is literally going to shoot the messenger. (And he looks as if he is, too.) The fact that he still says "master Gil" sheds some light on our earlier discussion about someone being minionized twice, although I suppose it could just be a habit of speech that doesn't mean too much. And, of course, he's exaggerating a bit when he suggests Gil in England will be more destabilizing than Madwa in England with a time-stopper. ➤ And, why aren't the characters making the obvious guess about it being Madwa that we're (all? most?) making? Did they carefully examine the female corpse while we weren't looking?➤ And why does Wooster say "I'm ''going to have to report this..." rather than "we're"? Trelawney was there too... ➤ By the way, it's noteworthy that we've had Jägers on the scene for several pages and they aren't the center of attention. That's pretty rare, I think. Bkharvey (talk) 05:32, February 9, 2018 (UTC) P.S. I feel like the sorcerer's apprentice... I keep getting multiple copies of the links to the previous and next page up at the top. :-( Bkharvey (talk) 05:40, February 9, 2018 (UTC) : 1. Wooster was the one who officially went to meet the submarine. Ms. Thorpe attached herself to the project. He's in the hotseat. 2. Sooner or later, we're going to meet Albia, it's inevitable. Or if the Foglios want to be sadistic and cruel, her corpse after Madwa kills her. 3. The Jagers might not be right there at the docks. We haven't actually seen any of them since the scene-shift. --Geoduck42 (talk) 06:23, February 9, 2018 (UTC) :: Re #3: Panel 4! Bkharvey (talk) 06:27, February 9, 2018 (UTC) ::: Ah. Missed that. Good to see. --Geoduck42 (talk) 08:55, February 9, 2018 (UTC) :::: By the way, the drawing of Maxim and of Zeetha is really weird in that panel. Zeetha looks goofy both because her mouth is way to our right, her left, of center, and because she's so rectilinear: the top of her hair is flat and the sides almost perfectly vertical, and her right wrist and right fingers are at right angles. (I can't hold my hand that way without some discomfort!) And Maxim looks positively evil, partly because his hair is spikier than usual but mainly because of his facial expression, with one eye closed and an asymmetrical smile, and I think a pointier-than-usual nose. OTOH, the errant speech balloon tail Wednesday has been fixed. Bkharvey (talk) 19:41, February 9, 2018 (UTC) :::: P.S. Even Oggie looks slightly off, because the asymmetry of his smile doesn't fit with the context, but he isn't creepy like Zeetha and Maxim. Bkharvey (talk) 20:25, February 9, 2018 (UTC) : They've already concluded that Madwa was killed by the unknown attacker. They had lots of time to check everything, including her body. The more pages pass without anybody mentioning Madwa, the least likely it is that anything relevant regarding Madwa is going to happen. MasakoRei (talk) 08:08, February 9, 2018 (UTC) :: I actually hope you're right. But the fact she's already faked corpses once, and we the viewers didn't specifically see her body keeps me from believing she's truly gone. --Geoduck42 (talk) 08:55, February 9, 2018 (UTC) : As for ''Master Gil, Master + first name is simply the formal title of a Baron's son. Most nobility boys are called that before they inherit the family's title. That's why Wooster called Gil that back when he was his valet. I feel that using "Master Gil" rather than "the Baron" (like he probably should) or even "Master Gilgamesh" demonstrates familiarity and friendship rather than "minionization". MasakoRei (talk) 08:08, February 9, 2018 (UTC) :: Ah, right, thanks! I'm so accustomed to calling him "Gil" just to save syllables that I forgot things are different in-story. Bkharvey (talk) 17:05, February 9, 2018 (UTC) P.S.: A new link to the previous and next page seems to appear on the page whenever I edit it. If you added any scripts to generate the page, please check them for a bug. : I was first on the page, and I didn't add any scripts. Did someone change the "Pbp nav" script? Bkharvey (talk) 17:05, February 9, 2018 (UTC) :: MasakoRei, you should have put your signature after your P.S. I had to look at the history to see who said that. As far as I know, nothing has changed. I don't understand why multiple navigation links appear when you edit the page. I removed the extra links. I don't know if it it happens when anyone else edits, but it doesn't happen when I do. How are you editing? Are you doing it differently than in the past? -- William Ansley (talk) 18:09, February 9, 2018 (UTC) ::: This has happened at least once before and I removed the extra links at that time as well, but I haven't had time to follow up on why it was happening. But it hasn't been happening long. However, extra blank lines have regularly appeared at the top of these forum pages for quite some time and more than usual appeared along with the extra nav links. Perhaps the two problems are related. -- William Ansley (talk) 18:20, February 9, 2018 (UTC) ::: Sorry about the missing signature, it seems I forgot to add it. I edited in the exact same way I always do (Edit > Source then Preview > Publish. The additional link already appears in the preview, but publishing without preview doesn't solve the issue). If I go to the Source tab then back to the visual tab, the additional link also appears. Same if I click the "Show changes" link before I hit Publish: an additional link is displayed in the changes. It's very weird. It's not just me. If you look at the history, you'll see it happened to Bkharvey and Geoduck42 too. Deleting the links entirely seems to be a good workaround: they're added back at publish (which can be checked in the preview) and therefore there's only one. MasakoRei (talk) 18:38, February 9, 2018 (UTC) ::: As an experiment, I went back to http://girlgenius.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:2017-08-09_(Wednesday) and made an edit, and sure enough, two extra sets of navigation links appeared. So it's not just something wrong with the setup of today's page and Wednesday's. If the template hasn't been changed, I suggest reporting it as a bug to wikia. By the way, another problem the past few days is that when I click the "increase indent" button for a new paragraph like this one, the paragraph above it also gets extra indentation, which kind of defeats the purpose. I wonder if the two are related -- some new wikia misfeature that manifests itself in these two different ways. Bkharvey (talk) 19:32, February 9, 2018 (UTC) ::: And a third problem: There is supposed to be a blank line between MasakoRei's paragraph and mine, and indeed I see one in the editor, but not in the published page. Bkharvey (talk) 19:34, February 9, 2018 (UTC) :::: Apparently, this is something that is happening when people use the visual editor, which I never do when I edit a forum page. I don't even have the option to do so; I have the source editor set as my default, and on most pages I have the Visual Editor as option in the Edit drop down menu, but not on the forum pages. I'll have to try changing to the Visual Editor as my default and see if I can use it on forum pages then, to see if I can reproduce the problem myself. I will also report this to Wikia. The blank lines you refer to weren't actually blank; they had wikia indent markup (":::") at the beginning. I removed it and the blank lines are showing up. Of course, that shouldn't be necessary. -- William Ansley (talk) 19:54, February 9, 2018 (UTC) :::: Right, my point is, it wasn't necessary until just recently. Another indication of wikia having changed something. Bkharvey (talk) 20:22, February 9, 2018 (UTC) ::::: I agree with your point. My point is that I had no idea it was possible to use the visual editor on forum pages until just now, so discovering this will help me when I report this bug to wikia. -- William Ansley (talk) 21:03, February 9, 2018 (UTC) :::::: :-) Bkharvey (talk) 21:18, February 9, 2018 (UTC) Chronology Note I try to be very careful to use the same placeholder names for recurring nameless characters, such as the blonde young woman in uniform on today's page, to make it easy to replace all the occurrences with links if a page is created for that character. I have assumed she and the other similarly uniformed characters are the dock wallopers mentioned on I started out calling her the Female Dock Walloper until more women in this uniform appeared, then I called her the "Bun Dock Walloper" because I thought she had her hair in a low bun, but today it looks more like a short ponytail, so I decided to call her the "Curl Dock Walloper" after the famous little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead. Note that Cheyenne made a coloring error on so the curl looks like part of her hat in panel 6, -- William Ansley (talk) 19:04, February 9, 2018 (UTC) Telephony I vaguely recall having raised this question before, but don't remember anything about its answer. What do we know about the state of telephony in Europa? Going by panel 6, they seem to have speaking tubes, as in old fashioned country homes, which I guess makes sense. But the range seems to be much wider than in speaking tubes in our world. So, do they have some kind of mechanical amplifier? (If it were an electrical amplifier, they would have to have microphones and speakers, and so they'd use fully-electric telephony. ➤ And what about switching capability? Does girl-with-a-curl have a direct line to the Sealord? If so, he must have at least several thousand speaking tubes in his office, leaving little room for anything else. Are there switchboard operators? Once you allow long-distance speaking tubes, a switchboard that can connect two of them together seems entirely feasible, but as far as we know, nobody has a phone number equivalent, so the operator would have to remember who lives where. Again, not so different from the early days of small-town telephony. On the other hand, a practical switchboard-based system would have to have more than one switchboard, I think, and the fanout problem would be much worse for acoustic signalling than for electric telephony. ➤ And, why don't they have electric telephony? They have electricity, one of Gil's specialties. Is it only static electricity? It really seems to me that once they have static electricity it shouldn't take that long to get electric circuits. And it's hard to imagine something like Vrin's mind-swap machine working without electricity. (It's strange, by the way, that the Castle has to drill holes in the senechal's head, when Vrin doesn't.) Bkharvey (talk) 23:22, February 9, 2018 (UTC) P.S. Oh, and apparently they can get messages from ships! How does that work without electricity? (And yet the students had to signal Castle Wulfenbach with a signal light. (And, how does the light work? Gas? On a dirigible? Sounds like a bad idea.)) Bkharvey (talk) 23:26, February 9, 2018 (UTC) : I can pretty much guarantee you've now spent more time worrying about this than the Foglios have. The real-life answer to your question is that it's cooler and more steampunky to use a speaking tube instead of a telephone. If you insist on an in-universe reason, I imagine that even with Klaus no doubt hammering through reforms, thanks to constant Sparky wars and obsessive secrecy and forced upgrades (and at least one whole nation sinking into the sea), the continent remains a hodge-podge of technology levels, with a wild mixture of gas, steam, clockwork, electricity and near-magical stuff. And yes, non-static electricity is clearly on that list- when the heroes find the Castle's backup power source, no one has to have the concept of a battery explained to them. --Geoduck42 (talk) 06:28, February 10, 2018 (UTC) :: Yeah, I'm kind of obsessive about telephony. Maybe I can just decide that the things that look like (acoustic) speaking tubes are really electrical (dynamic loudspeakers work as microphones in a pinch, although typically with terrible fidelity), and it's just the handset they haven't invented yet. Even in our world, user interface design is always way behind the underlying technology. Bkharvey (talk) 07:02, February 10, 2018 (UTC) Hey, Wait a Minute! Monday: Guy with handlebar mustache: "Who would have the nerve?" Girl with Curl: "At this time, we don't know." Today: Wooster asks for the name, and they do know, although they won't say it over the phone. This week's three cartoons all happen contiguously in time. (No jokes about the Lantern, thank you.) It can't be two minutes later that CurlGirl calls the Sealord back. Does this count as a continuity failure for the list? I think so... Bkharvey (talk) 06:57, February 10, 2018 (UTC) :I think you may be overthinking it. Blondie was relaying what last she heard in that previous page before they Mopey Tortoise began any docking procedure, and now is getting a call from the dock now that the airship is moored about who the hijacker is. --MadCat221 (talk) 17:08, February 10, 2018 (UTC) ::Overthinking is my middle name. :-) But "you are to meet the Mopey Tortoise..." (emphasis added) doesn't sound to me as if it's already docked. Remember, they lost some time to a detour via Calais. Bkharvey (talk) 17:37, February 10, 2018 (UTC)